I know I'll get beaten down for this, but I need to bring this up to ease my
troubled mind...
As most of you know, this mailing list is incredibly high-volume. As such, if
someone goes away for a few days, they return to something like 910 unread
messages (which is what I have right now) - not to mention commit emails.
This is just impossible for me to keep up with. I wonder if I'm alone in this
- I think I'm probably not.
However, as the Subversion community grows, the popularity increases. This
means more people are interested and have questions. That's a wonderful thing
and I'd love to encourage that as best as I can. Yet, from my brief purview
of unread messages, the mix of questions and topics on this list are starting
to become more user-oriented than purely developer-oriented.
Realistically, my time demands are such that reading such a high-traffic list
is almost impossible. This is not my full-time job (or even a job). ;-)
And, the subject lines usually aren't good enough to clue me in when I should
be reading a thread. I'm doing my best to try to keep up, but it's nearly
impossible to keep up.
For those of us who are volunteer developers (at least!), we need to
prioritize our time. And, trying to sift through 900-odd messages sent over a
few days isn't a good use of that time (IMHO). I'm more liable to just hit
'delete all' than actually read the unread messages. That's not good because
I feel that I can contribute a little bit to the discussions (namely anything
to do with autoconf, WebDAV, APR, httpd, etc.). But, I'm just overwhelmed
with the volume right now.
What I would like to propose is that we've finally hit the threshold where the
Subversion user community may be able to sustain a mailing list. This should
hopefully alleviate the pressure on the dev@svn list and reduce the volume on
that list. In order to properly bootstrap users@svn, all people currently on
dev@svn should be automagically subscribed to users@svn. (Thanks to Fitz for
suggesting this.) The people who have time constraints can unsubscribe from
the lists they don't have the time for. Hopefully, there will be enough
developers interested in bootstrapping the user community mailing list. (The
CollabNet guys probably have the time to read all of these emails! Ha!)
I'm concerned we're at the point where there is so much traffic that it'll be
hard to attract new developers who are interested in contributing and the mail
traffic is just going to be too much. And, I realize this would introduce
growing pains as we figure out the right topic mix of dev@svn and a new
users@svn. Hopefully, the community will benefit from this growth in the
long-term...
Thanks for listening and please let me know what you think. -- justin
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Received on Sat Jul 19 08:11:50 2003